While that's true, it also misses the point.  The Founding Fathers, in crafting the constitution of our federal republic, designed a sophisticated system of integrated checks-and-balances, the overwhelming strengths of which were intended to prevent the very scenario we face today, where a multi-generational stealth assault on liberty itself is now attempting to transition into its end game.  If those checks-and-balances were still working as designed, then the self-correcting mechanism of the federal system, already in place, would have obviated the need for the tea party movement.  But what has happened instead is that every single balancing mechanism that the Founding Fathers built into the Constitution either is failing or has failed, and thus we are where Samuel Adams foresaw when he wrote, "If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin."

The Republican Party, and indeed the entire concept of a republic, derives its name from the Latin word respublica (or respublicus), which literally translates to: "the public thing," which we commonly understand to mean "the law."  By logical extension, being a citizen in a republic at least implies the requirement to learn the rules in order to effectively operate by them (the same could be said for active membership in the Republican Party at any level), because if the system is operating properly, then the uninformed aren't capable of having any impact beyond the minimal.

The Republican Party in the United States began as a coalition of Conscience Whigs, Free Soil Democrats, and other Abolitionist activists who were adamantly opposed to the westward expansion of slavery in America (as opposed to the Democrat Party, which was quite comfortable with the expansion of slavery as far into the territories as could be done), and the Kansas-Nebraska Act in particular.  On March 20, 1854, in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, the first public meeting of the Republican Party was conducted.  Beginning in Jackson, Michigan (on July 6, 1854), progressing through at least seven additional states, and concluding in Worcester, Massachusetts, on September 7, 1854, delegated and duly-called state conventions systematically dissolved what was left of the Whig and Free-Soil parties, the Know-Nothing movement, and assimilated disenfranchised anti-slavery Democrats into what was now officially the Republican Party.

Following the 1854 mid-term elections - in which the brand-new Republican Party elected the Michigan Governor, flipped the U. S. House of Representatives, picked up eleven U. S. Senate seats, and established a "critical mass" presence in fifteen state legislatures - an informal national organization convention (analogous, it seems, to the contemporary national committee) was held on February 22-23, 1856 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, followed by the first-ever Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on June 17-19, 1856.  Had Pennsylvania and any one other "blue state" gone into the Republican column in the Presidential Election of 1856, we'd be referring to it as the "Party of Fremont" instead of as the "Party of Lincoln."  By the time the mid-term elections of 1858 were in the books, the Republican Party had achieved dominance in nearly every northern state.

At the beginning, the Republican Party had a core platform (anti-slavery, free market, gold standard, all-around very liberty-oriented) that would appeal to modern-day tea partiers.  In fact, history has shown that the Republican Party typically gets into trouble politically on two occasions: (1) when incorporating legislated moralism into the party platform, and (2) when adopting liberal-progressive policy positions.  A classic example of this is the Progressive Era, which left a major stain on the party's reputation that was not undone until the reforms under President Coolidge (opposing the League of Nations, promoting business interests, and so forth) effectively made the term "progressive" a very dirty word in American politics, at least temporarily.

Based on the actions of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison during George Washington's first term of office, I don't think it a stretch that even the concept of competing political parties was considered an integral part of the aforementioned sophisticated system of integrated checks-and-balances.  However, as with the rest of them, this important safeguard of liberty has broken down, in this case because people who are more interested in status and ego rather than the delivery of honest election results now occupy leadership positions within the central committees of both major parties, at every level.

Think about this; back in 2010, the tea party movement in Michigan handed the Michigan Republican Party all four elected executive offices, an unexpected majority in the State House, a 2/3 supermajority in the State Senate, swept the education board races, and returned a rule-of-law majority to the state supreme court.  You'd think that the MIGOP would have got the hint and made a point of advancing a liberty-oriented, constitutional conservative agenda and do what the grassroots who leveraged their election expected them to do.

Instead . . .

Let's be honest with ourselves, credible leadership is critical to accomplishing what should be the mission of the MIGOP.  Right now, I think that it's a reasonable conclusion that we don't have such state party leadership, otherwise:

• . . . Michigan would already be a Freedom-to-Work state
  
• . . . either or both of the Michigan FairTax Proposal and the Michigan HealthCare Freedom Initiative would be on the 2012 ballot (and quite possibly also an "Education Choice Initiative" that would provide for a statewide education voucher program)
  
• . . . we wouldn't be wasting taxpayer time and money on an international bridge that we don't need (and the taxpayers have made it clear that we don't want), and instead might be well on the way to getting some badly needed road repairs already accomplished
  
• . . . there'd be no question that Michigan's projected $300-plus million budget surplus would be immediately committed to paying down the state government's $76.6 billion debt
  
• . . . there wouldn't be a single partisan race this year, at any level (U. S. Senate all the way down to County Commission) that would be a freebie for the Michigan Democrat Party
  
• . . . Randy Richardville would have never been able to get away with buying the Senate Majority Leader post (through $5,000 contributions from his leadership PAC)
  
• . . . the Michigan Dele-Gate Fiasco would never have been considered, let alone happened (because we stick to the rules as they're published and don't endorse in contested primaries)